Posts tagged Prince of Rohan

While we’re all waiting for the servers to come back up, you can browse through not only the Patch Notes but also the Known Issues posted today.

The patch notes are pretty extensive with all sorts of things hanging especially for many classes. I highly suggest taking a read for your class of interest to see what’s new as there’s a ton for both the Freep side as well as creep side. A few that jumped out for me:

Lua Plugin manager! You can now pick what plugins you want loaded at the character selection screen. There’s now no reason for you all to not use plugins

I really like the idea of tracking nearby quests, I’m curious to see how it works out.

School Challenge mode requires you to actually kill Commander Thrash, not just save the books. Not really harder, just longer.

Quite a few Legendary Item Legacy strength reductions, including the Warden Exaltation of Battle

Starkmoor Quest deed requirement has been reduced to bring it in line with the other Dunland deeds.

As for the known issues, there are quite a few of them. Sadly it looks like most of them surround the new instance cluster. It appears that many of the bosses aren’t happy with Burglars, so be careful with what you choose to do where

Hopefully the known issues list won’t grow too much and this will be a smoother launch then Isengard, but only time will tell.

I know many, including myself, have been wondering how all these marks, medallions, and seals will work out and how our current stuff will transition to the new. Luckily Zombie Columbus puts it all out for us with a nice Q&A section to describe all the new currency changes coming with Update 5.

Overall I like the goal of consolidating and unifying between the new instances, the old scalable ones, and skirmishes. I think the biggest concern so far is with the availability of seals which are needed for the top tier armor sets.

For the three items, here’s the breakdown:

Marks are what we used to call Skirmish marks and everything concerning them hasn’t changed, including the spending of them for our skirmish soldiers.

Medallions are the new unified “bonus” mark we used to get that include things like:

Skirmish specific Campaign Marks

Scalable Instance Marks

Numbered Marks (1st Mark, 2nd Mark, etc.)

Various other armor piece trade-ins for things like Annuminas and Helegrod

For your Superior 4th Marks, you will have the option to trade them for either Seals or Medallions, but I believe Seals are the better route to take there.

As for obtaining these three, here’s the breakdown:

Marks

High drop rates in skirmishes

Moderate in Scaled Instances

Medallions

Low in Skirmishes (mainly from Encounters)

Moderate from Scaled Instances

High from the new Isengard Cluster

Seals

Low from Scaled Instance Challenge Quests (6 man and larger)

Moderate from Skirmish and Scaled Instance weekly Raid quests

High from the Isengard Instance bi-weekly quests (all sizes)

BIG thing to note here, ALL sizes of those Isengard bi-weekly quests will provide seals, so there is a way for smaller groups to obtain these sets, it just will take them a bit longer to get.

There’s a paragraph in there regarding the Instance Finder and dailies, and while I’m not 100% sure what’s going on specifically it sounds as though you won’t be punished for doing the same instance multiple times in a day. Granted, I don’t think you get the daily reward each time

Another interesting move was to remove the daily limit on the Classic Scaled Instances such that you can farm them to your eyes bleed if you want. 3-man instances will reward you with Medallions while 6 and 12 will provide Seals.

The rewards from the daily Skirmish quests (marks, gold, and reputation) have essentially been moved from the daily part to just included in the Skirmish quest. For those of you looking to farm reputation, this looks like a potentially viable way to do it!

There’s a LOT in that diary so I certainly suggest everyone check it out as I think ZC did a great job of laying all this out and explaining it. For the most part, I think this will work out better for everyone and I know Turbine will keep an eye on things as usual. Remember the major changes to the Ost Dunhoth raid armor sets? If things don’t go how they want for these currency changes, I would expect something similar.

I know this is technically a Developer Diary, but it didn’t quite flow like the others and while it is pretty comprehensive it isn’t much of a behind the scenes look at the system, it is more of a FAQ for the system. I have a feeling this is pretty much a summary of all the questions from the forums with some in-game shots of the various windows and pop-ups for the system. Some good stuff in there as well as a teaser for Update 6 that you’ll be able to tweak the random part of the system to EXCLUDE instances. Although I guess you could just exclude all but one to “randomly” select the one you want, but I’ll be interested to see what the restrictions are for that exclusion.

This episode is a little old as I recorded it prior to the Thanksgiving holiday but never finished editing it. However, be on the look out for another episode this week as well as another Turbine Interview next week.

Some new screenshots were released today showing off some of the new portions of the storyline.

Certainly some cool larger scale fights are teased, and I’m quite intrigued by the return of Ost Dunhoth. This is another interesting path to take us along, and I’m curious to see how this portion of the story evolves and how we’re led into Rohan.